the state of wine under Mac Os X

mr jingle · Post by **mr jingle** » Sat Dec 18, 2010 7:30 pm

Lately I've tried running some games under Snow Leopard, 10.6.4 to be precise, most of them being pre-Direct X 8 games, mainly for nostalgia reason.

Most of these games had no big problems running under Ubuntu 10.10 32bit, and being used to run Wine under Mac Os for some legacy work-related application, I thought It would have been pretty straightforward to run such games under Snow Leopard.

Unfortunately, most of them show problems and incongruences with the default behaviour shown under linux. Considering that it's not an isolated case, before I start spamming Bugzilla for every single game, I wonder if there's something I should know beforehand regarding some components that maybe are not up to par to the linux builds under Mac Os; like sound, d3d/ddraw support, or something else entirely.

Anyone could remove my doubts

?

Technical details: iMac core i3 3.2Ghz / ATI 5670 running snow leopard 10.6.4 / xQuartz 2.5.3, wine version 1.3.9 obtained trough macports.; it's a 32bit build running trough the 32bit version of the kernel. (there's nothing else I could think at the moment that could be considered relevant)

mr jingle · Post by **mr jingle** » Mon Dec 20, 2010 1:00 pm

No idea? Even a "don't bother, it won't work" or "most games should work more or less as running under linux" could be helpful, before spending an afternoon trying a game after another.
(Yeah, I know I could start reading the sources looking for different rendering / logic paths, I was just hoping that someone could have given me an answer without too much hassle

)

I could point to some examples of divergent behaviour if it could help, but I hope it's clear that it wasn't the scope of this post.

ahso · Post by **ahso** » Tue Dec 21, 2010 3:13 am

make sure to have all dependent libs! With my first compilations on ubuntu i was surprised about errors that others didn't have until i found out that i missed some libs.

doh123 · Post by **doh123** » Tue Dec 21, 2010 10:05 am

most of Wine's deficiencies on Mac OS X comes from requiring X11... and that Xquartz is not a full complete X server... its missing several features, or features are only partially implemented, that Wine uses, so many things will not work right.

That said, you should updated to Xquartz 2.6.0, as it has some initial RandR support that does help for fullscreen/window and resolution changing... it doesn't work too well with anything but a single monitor yet, but its a start.

mr jingle · Post by **mr jingle** » Thu Dec 23, 2010 9:55 am

@doh123: Unfortunately upgrading to xQuartz 2.6.0 did little to nothing to change the situation.

@ahso: I'm using a wine binary build from macports, it's quite probable that it was compiled with all the dependencies.

As an example, installing and running Need For speed Special edition under wine-1.3.9 under 32 bit ubuntu 10.10 was a breeze, with little to no troubles.

Under 10.6.5 the installer freezed just after showing the background image (16 bit installer bug maybe?), and after moving the installation folder from ubuntu to MacOs the application ( which had no problems running in software mode in ubuntu) just prints out a

Code: Select all

The instruction at 0x00493062 referenced memory at 0x00000004.
The memory could not be written.

error message.

Another example with a very common game is Age Of Empires 2. It runs roughly without problems under linux (no background music /intro voice, just some errors when rendering fonts), while it lags and crawls after a while when running under Mac Os X making it impossible to play. Unfortunately the original Discs miss the executables for apple architectures, Intel, PowerPC or otherwise.

But as I said before, they're just an example.